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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   1909 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 4, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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When is it acceptable to pee on the side of the road?

I've got 4 small kids (3 boys + 1 girl; only the girls is in diapers). We do a 2 hour road trip down to the grandparents about every other weekend. We always make them go to the bathroom before we leave, but we still have pee emergencies pretty much every trip.

For us, peeing on the side of the freeway is basically a must. If we try to find a proper bathroom, that's easily a 20+ minute detour. Driving to the bathroom is maybe 5 minutes, but then wrangling the problematic kid(s) is much more difficult in a dirty garage bathroom than on the side of the road. (I can't count the number of times I've had a kid wipe their junk on a public restroom toilet and then I have to do a serious disinfection...)

So my policy for side-of-road peeing is:

  1. It has to be safe to stop.

  2. There shouldn't be pedestrians around that can see us. (So this means no peeing on non-freeway type streets, and certain sections of freeway are also off limits.)

  3. There has to be "nature" to pee on. Some amount of grass/dirt is okay, but a tree is best. If we're on the stretch of the I5 in Irvine, where there's concrete everywhere, we won't stop. (This is partly related to pts 1+2.)

I realized on this week's roadtrip that I've never seen another car parked with the kids out peeing. Am I breaking some sort of major taboo here?

I'm also not sure what I'll do once the girl isn't wearing diapers, and whether I'll allow / force her to pee on the side of the road.

Two hours isn't that long. If your daughter is old enough to be out of pull ups, she should be old enough to hold it for two hours. Don't give her a big cup of juice.

Don't give her a big cup of juice.

I imagine that the parents around here will laugh at me, but I had to learn this the hard way with my nephew. I took him to a monster truck show a couple years ago (so he was 6), and I was given the OK by my brother to let him have soda if he wanted. Which of course he did. So I let him drink a 20 oz soda, and then get started on another at intermission, and... yeah we went to the bathroom about every 10 minutes the entire rest of the show. It just never occurred to me how small of a bladder kids have, and how if you let them drink too much they're going to have to pee constantly. Live and learn!

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